Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The fine mahogany secretaire with its secret drawers, the lacquered tea table, Chinese and Japanese porcelain tea ware. These fine luxury goods now seem to belong to the English country house or the exclusive antique shop. But what do they tell us about their eighteenth-century consumers? Who owned these goods, what made them desirable, where did they come from, and how were they made? And how many people actually enjoyed their novelty and fashion? In Luxury and Pleasure in. Eighteenth-Century Britain Maxine Berg explores not only how luxury consumer goods transformed the homes of Britain's urban middle classes but how their very production fostered and sustained the world's first industrial revolution. - ;Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments. that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the eighteenth century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities,and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new wants. This unparalleled 'product revolution' provoked. philosophers and pundits to proclaim a 'new luxury', one that reached out to the middling and trading